Monday, April 22, 2013

There are five top MegaTrends which will alter the structure of Human civilization, the quality of life for all peoples, the methods by which we deal with industrial and healthcare issues, the way in which we communicate [reference: The Sending Signals Blog], and the dominant and dangerous dependencies which will become all the more powerful because of our A) failure to find alternatives, and our B) building virtually every aspect of our socialization and commerce upon them. As said before in The Global Futurist Blog, these are neither all good nor all bad -- they are just megatrends to be prepared for in terms of our basic behavioral responses, as Human Beings, to change:

Acceptance (a passive approach, wherein we accept what is given us and do not exert our will to shape the anticipated change, nor do we exert our will to resist the change heading toward us) -- which is the reaction of the greatest percentage of our species;

Active Participation-- An approach where we do not leave the future to chance, but instead proactively and aggressively participate in an effort to change the course of the future or to pointedly build the future to our anticipated needs and desires (this is the rarest of responses from the standpoint of behavioral psychology and sociological dynamics;

Revolt Or Revolution -- A purely reactive response to predictions, when we are sufficiently threatened by the likelihood of their coming true. This is the second most popular type of anticipatory response to change when it is already happening

Here are the predictions, outlined cursorily, and in no particular order temporally or in terms of priority, greatest potential effect, or any other ordinal criteria:

1) Demographics- Amongst the educated and intellectually superior individuals in the most industrialized nations, marriage will become less popular, reproduction will become less popular, and the family unit and geographical "neighborhood" concept will all but disappear. Amongst the uneducated and poor, reproduction will continue at its present rate, creating an even greater disparity between social classes, and imposing an impossible strain upon governments seeking to "reallocate" via fiscal policy or monetary policy, resources to provide for all citizens and residents. Governments will become either resource-depleted and abandoned by the most resourceful and promising individuals, or they will try to enslave their peoples with tighter monitoring and controls both fiscally and physically.

2) Privacy- Electronic communications of every sort will not be private or protected by any means, and will have been completely compromised by a wide variety of agencies with a wide variety of motives and for an ever-increasing variety of uses. There will be no privacy between Human Beings where electronic, satellite, wave or other physical technologies are employed. Privacy will be very rare, hard to orchestrate and very expensive to arrange.Variations on RFID, GPS and other tracking technologies will be used to geo locate every inventoriable pereson. A small percentage of the population of the world will attempt to circumvent this intrusiveness by living "off the grid" in self-sufficient hideaways.

3) Health, Wellness And Medicine - The quality of life for those very few who will be able to afford it will be quite good, with excellent prospects for healthy, robust longevity of at least 33.33% greater than it is at present. The technologies employed will include: genetic engineering and re-engineering: cloning, nanotechnology, stem cell 'directing', electromagnetism and auto-donorship or regrowth of body parts, systems, organs and tissues. Such issues as skeletal, muscular, ocular and cardiac deterioration (as associated with telomere shortening) will occur much further on (i.e., later) in life, and diseases of the brain and nervous system will all but have been eliminated.

4) Mechanical Creationism - Through the utilization of three-dimesional computer-generated real-world objects, the ideations of visionaries will be birthed into the real world via computer design, programming and production. Whole objects, from individual molecules of a chemical substance for industrial or medical use to cars and buildings will be generated from diagrams -- rather like putting dough into a pasta-making machine. There will be a spate of mechanical "concept to corporeal" designs and increasing unemployment as manual skills will be in ever-diminishing demand, and only highly-skilled technicians, project managers and senior-level management will have any means of entry into a limited, telecommuter-filled marketplace. This bodes well for a better work-life balance, but it also portends further economic class divisions and poverty for those who cannot become entrepreneurs or solopreneurs in various niche markets.

5) Home and office security, as well as data and device access will have become multivariate biometric, with voice recognition to accompany the various reads and scans, and with passwords or smart cards (chip- or strip-implanted) only as a final line of defense in the security protocol of people, property, processes and data. And then again, data are never truly safe if transmitted by way of electrons, referring back to item #1, listed above.

*And now, a brief contemporary social observation and commentary (as public laughter and open amusement are legal for the time being, and because the Future, with the exception of certain major geological or astronomical events, can still be quite bright if that is how we choose to make it...:

FORGIVE ME READERS, FOR I KNOW NOT WHAT I'M DOING (Too Much Of The Time!)

Friday, April 12, 2013

When I forecast for the near-term, I endeavor to keep my visionary insights turned off to the greatest extent possible, while I choose certain specific variable relating to equally specific trends which I feel will either peak and fall (in the fairly near-term), or which have sufficient gravity (as used here, I am speaking of combination of such factors as: their importance to the economy; widespread media coverage; ongoing research grant allocations and investment; the amplitude of the change they would create; the power of the established industries or technologies which they would have to -- David and Goliath style -- disrupt and displace; and the views of other futurists and prognosticators looking at the same variables in the shorter-term) to be carried forward and create a serious rippling effect, radical sociological paradigm shift or revolutionary technological change.

I've only chosen a few items to focus on, and they are in areas where: the trending is swelling in amplitude; there are limits in accessibility to depletable resources (a finite quantity parameter); there are artificially subsidized or sustained institutions, industries or practices;
there are untenable compromises which foster instability; there are urgent changes required for society's and Humanity's survival; or, where there are institutions which are fatalistic by their nature, and have a "loot and pillage all that we can RIGHT NOW" mentality while the New Rome (or Babylon) burns, or while the Titanic slips into the freezing depths of an unforgiving dispassionate ocean.

I'll limit my global forecasts for the 50-year time frame to a simple outline form without going into the reasoning behind them in great detail:

1) The world's supply of potable water will be scarce, and Israeli desalinization technology will be used, subject to license, by many nations. There will be mass starvation and famine in Africa, parts of the Middle East, island republics and the Amazon;

2) Climate change, unpredictable and increasingly volatile, will create great damage to world infrastructure, significant alterations to continental positions, the decimation of some island civilizations and will make travel increasingly difficult;

3) There will be increased clashes between deprived and infuriated citizens (or servants or subjects) and the governments which have bankrupted them and helped to enslave them;

4) Asia will lose its economic advantage, and that advantage will move to parts of industrialized Europe, with some benefit to the United States.

5) The Caucasian and poorly educated minority of the U.S. citizenry will become increasingly armed and hostile toward the government, and violent (but media-suppressed)skirmishes will ensue; the demography of the U.S. will shift in favor of Latinos and Asians, and virtually all employment with the exception of the entrepreneurial sector, will be by governments or their agencies;

7) Fossil fuels will decrease in use and utility as their availability is compromised by surface transport issues;

8) The United States will be militarily involved in multiple wars throughout the world;

9) Complete invisibility cloaking will be in use by covert and acknowledged government agencies domestically and internationally.

10) Plasma, laser and other wave-based or radiation-based weapons will be in ordinary use.

11) Mexico will become a rogue state, run by a coalition of corrupt government officials and the drug lords. Other countries will likely follow suit;

12) There will have been a shift toward atomic energy;

13) There will have been a shift from internet to satellite communications;

14) Entire limbs and organs will be grown utilizing stem cells combined with electromagnetic technology and genetic engineering, and for the few who can afford it, the Human lifespan will have been increased to in excess of 130 years. Females will outlive males. The average lifespan due to environmental and socio-economic factors will decrease significantly from where it is today;

15) Those persons who can get work will be telecommuting from their secured residences, and most recreation will not take place outside secured zones in enclosed areas;

16) A great deal of recreational time will be spent in virtual reality, as an escape into fantasy from the harsh realities of future life;

17) Society will not have attained Kurzweil's point of Singularity, but substantially all menial, physical or clerical jobs will be undertaken by robots. Machines will build machines, but none will exhibit genuine Artificial Intelligence;

18) There will be movements amongst various governments to eliminate paper currency to facilitate better tracking of money, materiel and personnel, as well as to simplify the tax collection process. There will be riots in otherwise civilized countries over this;

19) Most device and access security will be by a combination of biometrics instead of encryption;

20) Humanity will be de-socialized to the extent that we will be living in a sort of high-technology Medieval revival, with corporate-government cartels being the lairds of their respective territories, and individuals will serve them, putting country and citizenship affiliations second;

21) Most of the world's wealth will be controlled by less than 1% of the total population -- the other 99% will be struggling for survival in a polluted, unsafe, violent world -- a world overcome by the madness that comes of hyper-vigilance and constant fear;

22) Most educated couples will choose not to have children, while the uneducated will continue to create families which they cannot responsibly support;

23) Pollution in Asia and in certain parts of Latin America will make the air quality so poor that people will not be able to spend any time outdoors, except with air filtration gear;

24) Most of the world's peoples will be living in abject poverty, and will literally be fighting for their their lives;

25) The tremendous resurgence which we are witnessing today amongst the Doomsday Preppers, the End-Times Groups and the militant anti-government groups is ultimately a foreshadowing of items 1 through 24, above. As someone once told me, "Just 'cause you's paranoid don't mean that they ain't out to get you." In these extreme cases, these groups are partially prophetic and partially a disparate self-fulfilling prophesy. There will be incidents involving drones killing innocents, planned assassinations, chemical and biological tests gone wrong and some tragedies involving 'dirty nukes'. Rhetorically-justified lawlessness will be the privilege of those who can either choose to be or pay to be exempt from the law.

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I also believe that there will be the promising beginnings of colonization of other planets or their moons by the next wave of Human pioneers, and they will be Humankind's greatest hope for the future. These colonists will have wonderful, powerful technologies to aid them in their re-creation of a society, but (and this is conjecture -- not forecast), hopefully these few will have sociologically, psychologically and spiritually advanced to the point that they do not want to invest in a zero-sum game.

Instead, I hope that these few will be collaborative, and see the very notion of civilization as a goal to be striven for above all else except for the right to be different from others, but yet fully accepting of them.

Thank you, as always for reading me, and for sharing my articles with your colleagues and connections over the interconnectedness of social media.